Search results

Characterizing the behavior of disease genes in the context of biological networks has the potential to shed light on disease mechanisms, and to reveal both new candidate disease genes and therapeutic targets. Previous studies addressing the network properties of disease genes have produced contradictory results. Here we have explored the causes of these discrepancies and assessed the relationship between the network roles of disease genes and their tolerance to deleterious germline variants in human populations leveraging on: the abundance of interactome resources, a comprehensive catalog of disease genes and exome variation data. We found that the most salient network features of disease genes are driven by cancer genes and that genes related to different types of diseases play network roles whose centrality is inversely correlated to their tolerance to likely deleterious germline mutations. This proved to be a multiscale signature, including global, mesoscopic and local network centrality features. Cancer driver genes, the most sensitive to deleterious variants, occupy the most central positions, followed by dominant disease genes and then by recessive disease genes, which are tolerant to variants and isolated within their network modules. ; We received support from UBACyT (20020130100582BA) and MinCyT (PICT2014-2701), ISCIII-FEDER (PI13/00082, CP10/00524), IMI-JU under grants agreements n° 115002 (eTOX), n° 115191 (Open PHACTS)], n° 115372 (EMIF) and n° 115735 (iPiE), resources of which are composed of financial contribution from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) and EFPIA companies' in kind contribution, and the EU H2020 Programme 2014-2020 under grant agreements no. 634143 (MedBioinformatics) and no. 676559 (Elixir-Excelerate). The Research Programme on Biomedical Informatics (GRIB) is a node of the Spanish National Institute of Bioinformatics (INB). A.G.-P. is supported by a Ramon y Cajal scholarship funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy. The authors would like to thank the Exome Aggregation Consortium and the groups that provided exome variant data for comparison. A full list of contributing groups can be found at http://exac.broadinstitute.org/about.

The current wealth of genomic variation data identified at nucleotide level presents the challenge of understanding by which mechanisms amino acid variation affects cellular processes. These effects may manifest as distinct phenotypic differences between individuals or result in the development of disease. Physical interactions between molecules are the linking steps underlying most, if not all, cellular processes. Understanding the effects that sequence variation has on a molecule's interactions is a key step towards connecting mechanistic characterization of nonsynonymous variation to phenotype. We present an open access resource created over 14 years by IMEx database curators, featuring 28,000 annotations describing the effect of small sequence changes on physical protein interactions. We describe how this resource was built, the formats in which the data is provided and offer a descriptive analysis of the data set. The data set is publicly available through the IntAct website and is enhanced with every monthly release. ; The IntAct database and EMBL-EBI-based authors received funding from EMBL core funding and Open Targets (grant agreement OTAR-044). The DIP database is funded by NIH grant R01GM123126. MINT received support from ERC grant 'DEPTH project of the European Research Council (grant agreement 322749)'. The British Heart Foundation-University College of London (BHF-UCL) curation team is funded with the British Heart Foundation grant RG/13/5/30112. UniProt curation activities at EMBL-EBI and the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics are funded by the National Eye Institute, National Human Genome Research Institute, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, National Institute of General Medical Sciences, and National Institute of Mental Health of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number [U24HG007822], National Human Genome Research Institute under Award Numbers [U41HG007822 and U41HG002273], and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences under Award Numbers [R01GM080646, P20GM103446 and U01GM120953] (the content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health); Swiss Federal Government through the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation; and aforementioned British Heart Foundation grants and EMBL core funding. DisGeNET is supported with EU-FP7 funds from ISCIII-FEDER (CP10/00524, CPII16/00026), IMI-JU (grant agreement no. 116030, TransQST) and EFPIA companies in kind contribution, and the EU H2020 Programme 2014-2020 (grant agreements no. 634143, MedBioinformatics and no. 676559, Elixir-Excelerate). The Research Programme on Biomedical Informatics (GRIB) is a member of the Spanish National Bioinformatics Institute (INB), PRB2-ISCIII and is supported by grant PT13/0001/0023, of the PE I+D+i 2013-2016, funded by ISCIII and FEDER. The DCEXS is a 'Unidad de Excelencia María de Maeztu', funded by the MINECO (ref: MDM-2014-0370). I.J. and group supported in part by Krembil Foundation, Ontario Research Fund (#34876), and Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI #225404, #30865, #33536). The authors would like to thank Marco Galardini, Luz García-Alonso, Denes Turei and Martin Krallinger for valuable discussions when designing the data set output format; Iain Moal for providing key information about SKEMPI 2.0; Danish Memon for his help pre-processing cBioPortal data; and Luz García-Alonso as the creator of the Python scripts we used to parse UniProt mutagenesis annotations.

MOTIVATION: DisGeNET-RDF makes available knowledge on the genetic basis of human diseases in the Semantic Web. Gene-disease associations (GDAs) and their provenance metadata are published as human-readable and machine-processable web resources. The information on GDAs included in DisGeNET-RDF is interlinked to other biomedical databases to support the development of bioinformatics approaches for translational research through evidence-based exploitation of a rich and fully interconnected linked open data. ; We received support from ISCIII-FEDER (PI13/00082, CP10/00524), from the IMI-JU under grants agreements no. 115002 (eTOX), no. 115191 (Open PHACTS), no. 115372 (EMIF) and no. 115735 (iPiE), resources of which are composed of financial contribution from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) and EFPIA companies' in kind contribution, and the EU H2020 Programme 2014–2020 under grant agreements no. 634143 (MedBioinformatics) and no. 676559 (Elixir-Excelerate). The Research Programme on Biomedical Informatics (GRIB) is a node of the Spanish National Institute of Bioinformatics (INB).

Drug toxicity is a major concern for both regulatory agencies and the pharmaceutical industry. In this context, text-mining methods for the identification of drug side effects from free text are key for the development of up-to-date knowledge sources on drug adverse reactions. We present a new system for identification of drug side effects from the literature that combines three approaches: machine learning, rule- and knowledge-based approaches. This system has been developed to address the Task 3.B of Biocreative V challenge (BC5) dealing with Chemical-induced Disease (CID) relations. The first two approaches focus on identifying relations at the sentence-level, while the knowledge-based approach is applied both at sentence and abstract levels. The machine learning method is based on the BeFree system using two corpora as training data: the annotated data provided by the CID task organizers and a new CID corpus developed by crowdsourcing. Different combinations of results from the three strategies were selected for each run of the challenge. In the final evaluation setting, the system achieved the highest Recall of the challenge (63%). By performing an error analysis, we identified the main causes of misclassifications and areas for improving of our system, and highlighted the need of consistent gold standard data sets for advancing the state of the art in text mining of drug side effects. ; This work was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health (GM114833, GM089820, TR001114); the Instituto de Salud Carlos III-Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (PI13/00082 and CP10/00524 to A.B. and L.I.F.); the Innovative Medicines Initiative-Joint Undertaking (eTOX no. 115002, Open PHACTs no. 115191, EMIF no. 115372, iPiE no. 115735 to A.B. and L.I.F.), resources of which are composed of financial contributions from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–13) and European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations; and the European Union Horizon 2020 Programme 2014–20 (MedBioinformatics no. 634143 and Elixir-Excelerate no. 676559 to A.B. and L.I.F.). The Research Programme on Biomedical Informatics (GRIB) is a node of the Spanish National Institute of Bioinformatics (INB).

In toxicogenomics, functional annotation is an important step to gain additional insights into genes with aberrant expression that drive pathophysiological mechanisms. Nevertheless, there exists a gap on annotation of these genes which often hampers the interpretation of results and limits their applicability in translational medicine. In this study, we evaluated the coverage of functional annotations of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) induced by 10 selected compounds from the TG-GATEs database identified as high- or no-risk in causing drug-induced liver injury (most-DILI or no-DILI, respectively) using in vitro human data. Functional roles of DEGs not present in the most common biological annotation databases - termed "dark genes" - were unveiled via literature mining and via the identification of shared regulatory transcription factors or signaling pathways. Our results demonstrated that there were approximately 13% of dark genes induced by these compounds in vitro and we were able to obtain additional relevant information for up to 76% of those. Using interactome data from several sources, we have uncovered genes such as LRBA, and WDR26 as highly connected in the protein network that play roles in drug response. Genes such as MALAT1, H19, and MIR29C - whose links to hepatotoxicity have been confirmed - were identified as markers for the most-DILI group and appeared as top hits across all literature-based mining methods. Furthermore, we investigated the potential impact of dark genes on liver toxicity by identifying their rat orthologs in combination with their correlation to drug-induced liver pathologies observed in vivo following chemical exposure. We identified a set of important regulatory transcription factors of dark genes for all most-DILI compounds including E2F1 and JUND with supporting evidences in literature and we found Magee1 correlated with chemically induced bile duct hyperplasia and adverse responses at 29 days in rats in vivo. In conclusion, in this study we show the potential role of these poorly annotated genes in mechanisms underlying hepatotoxicity and offer a number of computational approaches that may help to minimize current gaps in gene annotation and highlight their values as potential biomarkers in toxicological studies. ; This project has received funding from the Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 Joint Undertaking under grant agreement no. 116030 (TransQST). This Joint Undertaking receives support from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and EFPIA.

PsyGeNET (Psychiatric disorders and Genes association NETwork) is a knowledge platform for the exploratory analysis of psychiatric diseases and their associated genes. PsyGeNET is composed of a database and a web interface supporting data search, visualization, filtering and sharing. PsyGeNET integrates information from DisGeNET and data extracted from the literature by text mining, which has been curated by domain experts. It currently contains 2642 associations between 1271 genes and 37 psychiatric disease concepts. In its first release, PsyGeNET is focused on three psychiatric disorders: major depression, alcohol and cocaine use disorders. PsyGeNET represents a comprehensive, open access resource for the analysis of the molecular mechanisms underpinning psychiatric disorders and their comorbidities. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The PysGeNET platform is freely available at http://www.psygenet.org/. The PsyGeNET database is made available under the Open Database License (http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1.0/). CONTACT: lfurlong@imim.es SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION:/nSupplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online. ; This work was supported by Instituto de Salud Carlos III-Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (CP10/00524, PI13/00082 and RD12/028/024 and RD12/0028/0009 Retics-RTA), MINECO (SAF2013-41761-R-Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional), the Innovative Medicines Initiative Joint Undertaking (no. 115372, EMIF and no. 115191, Open PHACTS), resources of which are composed of financial contribution from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) and EFPIA companies' in kind contribution. The Research Programme on Biomedical Informatics (GRIB) is a node of the Spanish National Institute of Bioinformatics (INB).

The past decades have witnessed a paradigm shift from the traditional drug discovery shaped around the idea of "one target, one disease" to polypharmacology (multiple targets, one disease). Given the lack of clear-cut boundaries across disease (endo)phenotypes and genetic heterogeneity across patients, a natural extension to the current polypharmacology paradigm is to target common biological pathways involved in diseases via endopharmacology (multiple targets, multiple diseases). In this study, we present proximal pathway enrichment analysis (PxEA) for pinpointing drugs that target common disease pathways towards network endopharmacology. PxEA uses the topology information of the network of interactions between disease genes, pathway genes, drug targets and other proteins to rank drugs by their interactome-based proximity to pathways shared across multiple diseases, providing unprecedented drug repurposing opportunities. Using PxEA, we show that many drugs indicated for autoimmune disorders are not necessarily specific to the condition of interest, but rather target the common biological pathways across these diseases. Finally, we provide high scoring drug repurposing candidates that can target common mechanisms involved in type 2 diabetes and Alzheimer's disease, two conditions that have recently gained attention due to the increased comorbidity among patients. ; The authors received funding from the Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 Joint Undertaking under grant agreement No. 116030. This Joint Undertaking receives support from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and EFPIA. The authors also received support from EU H2020 Programme 2014–2020 under grant agreement No. 676559 (Elixir-Excelerate). E.G. was supported by EU-cofunded Beatriu de Pinós incoming fellowship from the Agency for Management of University and Research Grants (AGAUR) of Government of Catalunya and L.I.F. received support from ISCIII-FEDER (CPII16/00026). H.H.H.W.S. has received funding from from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 777111 (Repotrial). The Research Programme on Biomedical Informatics (GRIB) is a member of the Spanish National Bioinformatics Institute (INB), PRB2-ISCIII and is supported by grant PT13/0001/0023, of the PE I+D+i 2013–2016, funded by ISCIII and FEDER. The DCEXS is a "Unidad de Excelencia María de Maeztu", funded by the MINECO (ref: MDM-2014-0370)

As genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have grown in size, the number of genetic variants that have been associated per disease has correspondingly increased. Despite this increase in the number of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) identified per disease, their biological interpretation has in many cases remained elusive. To address this, we have combined GWAS results with orthogonal sources of evidence, namely the current knowledge of molecular pathways; real-world clinical data from six million patients; RNA expression across tissues from Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients, and purpose-built rodent models for experimental validation. In more detail, first we show that when examined at a pathway level, analysis of all GWAS studies groups AD in a cluster with disorders of immunity and inflammation. Using clinical data, we show that the degree of comorbidity of these diseases with AD correlates with the strength of their genetic association with molecular participants in the Janus kinases/signal transducer and activator of transcription (JAK-STAT) pathway. Using four independent RNA expression datasets we then find evidence for the altered regulation of JAK-STAT pathway genes in AD. Finally, we use both in vitro and in vivo rodent models to demonstrate that Aβ induces gene expression of the key drivers of this pathway, providing experimental evidence to validate these data-driven observations. These results therefore nominate JAK-STAT anomalies as a prominent aetiopathological event in AD and hence a potential target for therapeutic development, and moreover demonstrate a de novo multi-modal approach to derive information from rapidly increasing genomic datasets. ; This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust [104025], the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme 2014-2020 under Grant Agreement No 634143, the MRC Data Pathfinder award [MC_PC_17215], and the NIHR Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre.

The information about the genetic basis of human diseases lies at the heart of precision medicine and drug discovery. However, to realize its full potential to support these goals, several problems, such as fragmentation, heterogeneity, availability and different conceptualization of the data must be overcome. To provide the community with a resource free of these hurdles, we have developed DisGeNET (http://www.disgenet.org), one of the largest available collections of genes and variants involved in human diseases. DisGeNET integrates data from expert curated repositories, GWAS catalogues, animal models and the scientific literature. DisGeNET data are homogeneously annotated with controlled vocabularies and community-driven ontologies. Additionally, several original metrics are provided to assist the prioritization of genotype–phenotype relationships. The information is accessible through a web interface, a Cytoscape App, an RDF SPARQL endpoint, scripts in several programming languages and an R package. DisGeNET is a versatile platform that can be used for different research purposes including the investigation of the molecular underpinnings of specific human diseases and their comorbidities, the analysis of the properties of disease genes, the generation of hypothesis on drug therapeutic action and drug adverse effects, the validation of computationally predicted disease genes and the evaluation of text-mining methods performance. ; Instituto de Salud Carlos III-Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional [CP10/00524 and PI13/00082]; Innovative Medicines Initiative Joint Undertaking [Open PHACTs No. 115191]; resources of which are composed of financial contribution from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme [FP7/2007-2013]; EFPIA companies' in kind contribution; European Union Horizon 2020 Programme 2014-2020 [MedBioinformatics No. 634143 and Elixir-Excelerate No. 676559]. The Research Programme on Biomedical Informatics (GRIB) is a member of the Spanish National Bioinformatics Institute (INB), PRB2-ISCIII and is supported by grant PT13/0001/0023, of the PE I+D+i 2013-2016, funded by ISCIII and FEDER. Funding for open access charge: Instituto de Salud Carlos III-Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional [PI13/00082].

Background: Drug-induced liver injury (DILI) is an adverse reaction caused by the intake of drugs of common use that produces liver damage. The impact of DILI is estimated to affect around 20 in 100,000 inhabitants worldwide each year. Despite being one of the main causes of liver failure, the pathophysiology and mechanisms of DILI are poorly understood. In the present study, we developed an ensemble learning approach based on different features (CMap gene expression, chemical structures, drug targets) to predict drugs that might cause DILI and gain a better understanding of the mechanisms linked to the adverse reaction. Results: We searched for gene signatures in CMap gene expression data by using two approaches: phenotype-gene associations data from DisGeNET, and a non-parametric test comparing gene expression of DILI-Concern and No-DILI-Concern drugs (as per DILIrank definitions). The average accuracy of the classifiers in both approaches was 69%. We used chemical structures as features, obtaining an accuracy of 65%. The combination of both types of features produced an accuracy around 63%, but improved the independent hold-out test up to 67%. The use of drug-target associations as feature obtained the best accuracy (70%) in the independent hold-out test. Conclusions: When using CMap gene expression data, searching for a specific gene signature among the landmark genes improves the quality of the classifiers, but it is still limited by the intrinsic noise of the dataset. When using chemical structures as a feature, the structural diversity of the known DILI-causing drugs hampers the prediction, which is a similar problem as for the use of gene expression information. The combination of both features did not improve the quality of the classifiers but increased the robustness as shown on independent hold-out tests. The use of drug-target associations as feature improved the prediction, specially the specificity, and the results were comparable to previous research studies. ; The authors received funding from the Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 Joint Undertaking under grant agreements TransQST and eTRANSAFE (refs: 116030, 777365). This Joint Undertaking receives support from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and EFPIA companies in kind contribution. The authors also received support from Spanish Ministry of Economy (MINECO, refs: BIO2017–85329-R (FEDER, EU), RYC-2015-17519) as well as EU H2020 Programme 2014–2020 under grant agreement No. 676559 (Elixir-Excelerate) and from Agència de Gestió D'ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca Generalitat de Catalunya (AGAUR, ref.: 2017SGR01020). L.I.F. received support from ISCIII-FEDER (ref: CPII16/00026). The Research Programme on Biomedical Informatics (GRIB) is a member of the Spanish National Bioinformatics Institute (INB), PRB2-ISCIII and is supported by grant PT13/0001/0023, of the PE I + D + i 2013–2016, funded by ISCIII and FEDER. The DCEXS is a "Unidad de Excelencia María de Maeztu", funded by the MINECO (ref: MDM-2014-0370). J.A.P. received support from the CAMDA Travel Fellowship.

Most hospitals have already implemented information systems and Electronic Health Records (EHRs), but the reuse of such data for research is still infrequent. We present a pilot project on the exploitation of clinical information from a Spanish hospital database in the context of the European Medical Information Framework project (EMIF). Specific use cases such as patients with diabetes mellitus type 2, obesity and dementia were assessed, by exploiting EHR data integrated from several separated clinical databases. The possibility to analyse the features of specific groups of patients based on their diagnosis codes can provide new data about relationships between different conditions that can contribute for decision-making, healthcare and research. ; EMIF is a project funded by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), a public-private partnership between the European Union and the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA).

Understanding relationships between diseases, such as comorbidities, has important socio-economic implications, ranging from clinical study design to health care planning. Most studies characterize disease comorbidity using shared genetic origins, ignoring pathway-based commonalities between diseases. In this study, we define the disease pathways using an interactome-based extension of known disease-genes and introduce several measures of functional overlap. The analysis reveals 206 significant links among 94 diseases, giving rise to a highly clustered disease association network. We observe that around 95% of the links in the disease network, though not identified by genetic overlap, are discovered by functional overlap. This disease network portraits rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, atherosclerosis, pulmonary diseases and Crohn's disease as hubs and thus pointing to common inflammatory processes underlying disease pathophysiology. We identify several described associations such as the inverse comorbidity relationship between Alzheimer's disease and neoplasms. Furthermore, we investigate the disruptions in protein interactions by mapping mutations onto the domains involved in the interaction, suggesting hypotheses on the causal link between diseases. Finally, we provide several proof-of-principle examples in which we model the effect of the mutation and the change of the association strength, which could explain the observed comorbidity between diseases caused by the same genetic alterations. ; Authors acknowledge support of Spanish Ministry of Economy MINECO grant BIO2014-57518-R, Instituto Carlos III (ISCIII) FEDER grants CP10/00524 and PI13/00082, and EU H2020 Programme 2014-2020 under grant agreement no. 634143 (MedBioinformatics). CRP is supported by Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness FPI fellowship (BES2013063354). EG is supported by EU cofounded AGAUR Beatriu de Pinos fellowship from Government of Catalunya. The Research Programme on Biomedical Informatics (GRIB) is member of the Spanish National Bioinformatics Institute (INB) and PRB2-ISCIII, supported by grant PT13/0001/0023 of the PE I+D+I 2013-2016 funded by ISCII-FEDER.

eTRANSAFE is a research project funded within the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), which aims at developing integrated databases and computational tools (the eTRANSAFE ToxHub) that support the translational safety assessment of new drugs by using legacy data provided by the pharmaceutical companies that participate in the project. The project objectives include the development of databases containing preclinical and clinical data, computational systems for translational analysis including tools for data query, analysis and visualization, as well as computational models to explain and predict drug safety events. ; This research received funding from the Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 Joint Undertaking under grant agreements eTRANSAFE (777365). This Joint Undertaking receives support from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and EFPIA companies in kind contribution.